Remembering My Cousin on 9/11

In a corner of the Javits Convention Center a few days after the terrorist attack on New York in 2001, my Aunt Arlene Howard, handed President George W. Bush my cousin's Port Authority Police badge. He still has it.

This is his story.

We shared the same middle name. Gerard.

It is a middle name common among Catholic households, because Gerard is the patron saint of mothers. In difficult pregnancies, Catholic moms would pray to St. Gerard, and if things worked out and a healthy baby was born, it was not unusual for the mother to honor the saint by bestowing his name on the son or daughter.

My cousin, George, was a couple of years older than me, and grew up on Long Island, far from my home in Saginaw, MI. But when I reconnected with him years later, I found out we had a lot in common. A love for the outdoors and hiking, for instance, and a devotion to family. I think if we could have gotten to know each other a little better before his life was tragically ended, we could have been friends.

It was a pretty big deal in our family when my cousins from the East Coast came to visit us in Saginaw when I was a kid. The Howard Family from which my grandmother was a member, was a large farm family from Mason County, and two of the boys had splintered off and made their way to New York City, where they settled and raised families of their own.

About every five years of so, the clan from out East would come and visit us in Michigan, and as was the Irish way, we threw a huge picnic at my cousins place on the west side of town, because they had a huge backyard.

While the older family members sat and did what good Irish do, drink, the kids would eat, drink pop, and play a little softball. The pop was the first point of contention. The cousins who were around my age, Tim and George, insisted that we call it "soda".

With their strange accents, and their New York City of air of superiority, the cousins seemed a bit pushy about it, and so soon an argument developed that my Dad and Uncle Leo had to come quash. There were resentments about it at first, but soon, we were wrapped in a big inter-cousin softball game, and the whole thing was forgotten.

I didn't see George and Tim for the longest time after that. The Howard clan had regular reunions, but when I was in Michigan, the reunions were always on the East Coast, and when I moved to the East Coast, they always seemed to be in Michigan, and I could never sync my schedule enough to attend.

Finally, in 1999, I gathered up the kids and drove them to the Howard reunion in Wilkes Barre, PA. It was there I caught up with George and Tim and found out George was a Port Authority Police Officer and Tim lived near me in oddly enough, Howard County, MD.

George regaled me with tales of rappelling off buildings and some of the other anti-terrorist training they had done as a member of the Elite Service Unit. They had ratcheted up their efforts since the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center, which was officially under the control of the Port Authority. I met his sons, Christopher and Robert, and found out one of them was interested in what I did for a living, being on the radio. It was nice to catch up and they day was over way too soon. In one of my piles of old photographs, there is a photo of the Howard men gathered on that rainy afternoon in a pavilion in that long forgotten Pennsylvania park. It was last I saw George.

Two years later, when the horror of the attacks that September 11th morning contrasted with beautiful late summer day they occurred on, I remember driving home and trying to process it all in my head. I couldn't. It was too surreal.

That night, I took my dog for a walk and looked to the sky. It was quiet and clear, which was very strange because we lived on the flight path to Baltimore Washington International Airport. Like many that evening, I wondered what the future held for my children.

When I returned home, I received a call from my sister in Michigan. George was missing at the World Trade Center site. He had gone there on his day off to see if he could help in any way. According to Newsday, he was last seen helping a stranger. "He disappeared into the smoke," his son said. His body was recovered from the debris that afternoon.

Because of travel restrictions, and the closure of the tunnels linking the City to New Jersey, none of the Michigan relatives could attend his funeral. Ten days later, while addressing the joint session of Congress, President George W. Bush held up my cousin's police badge as symbol of those who sacrificed their lives  He carries it to this day.

I didn't know George well, but you could see the family resemblance in each of our faces. I think this story from his obituary summed up how he was:

Every summer, George Howard used to load up the Chevrolet Suburban and for the next two to three weeks he and his sons would explore some corner of America.

 

Father and sons Christopher and Robert hiked the Grand Canyon, camped out in Yellowstone National Park and rappeled down a cliff in Acadia National Park in Maine.

 

The trio visited Alcatraz and Disney World.

 

"We drove all over the country," said Christopher Howard, now 28, of Hicksville.

 

On one trip, they had been driving from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon, when Christopher Howard spotted a flipped-over car and pointed it out to his father, who pulled over.

 

"He pulled the woman out of the car and stayed with her for an hour until state police came and airlifted her out of there," his son recalled. "I was 14 years old. I didn't really know what to think. We just kind of sat there and watched."

During the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Howard helped several hundred people find their way out of the darkness and into safety.

 

"There is no single hero story," Howard told a reporter. "Everybody just did their job. That's what they pay us for."

 

It will be hard living up to the example set by George, but everyday I try. Rest in Peace, my cousin.